End of the line isn’t end of their journey

A freight train once ran through this town near the Guatemalan border. It carried cattle feed, cement and steel. Every day, a hundred or more men and women jumped on its rattletrap cars and hitched a free ride northward.

Few locals miss the train, which stopped operating in July. But for the Central American immigrants who pass through southern Mexico on a desperate, 1,200-mile odyssey to the United States, the line’s closure is a disaster of epic proportions.

Small groups of men and women now walk for days along the tracks, carried forward by the false hope that the trains might be running at the next station. A few stop only after walking 100 miles or more. Many more from Central America continue to arrive in Tenosique and other border towns believing that the railroad will soon restart.

“They say the train might start running on Monday,” said Pedro Joaquin Rios, 25, from Honduras, as he stood on the rail line one mile outside Tenosique, in eastern Tabasco.

“If it doesn’t, the idea is to get to Coatzacoalcos walking,” he added, referring to a city about 200 miles away on the Gulf coast.

The absence of the train has led to a local boom in immigrant smuggling. On Thursday, a boat with 26 illegal immigrants, most of them Salvadorans, sank in the Pacific off Oaxaca. By Sunday, 15 bodies had washed up and two survivors had been rescued.

For a generation of Central American migrants, the Chiapas-Mayab Railroad was an essential shortcut on the long journey north to the U.S. border.

After crossing illegally into Mexico, countless migrants were robbed by armed men who stalked the rail lines, and many migrants were maimed or killed falling from the boxcars. In spite of the dangers, Central Americans continue to seek out the trains that no longer run.

Jesus Maldonado, a Catholic priest who runs the independent Tabasco Human Rights Committee, recently met a dozen people who had turned themselves over to police near Chontalpa, Tabasco, after a 180-mile walk on the rail lines in punishing tropical heat. The migrants were treated and then deported.

“They were completely destroyed physically and emotionally,” he said. “We always hated the train. But now we see how much worse the suffering is without it.”

Built almost a century ago, the Chiapas-Mayab Railroad had long been a rusting anachronism. In its final days, the Mayab line that ran through Tenosique linked the Gulf state of Veracruz to the Yucatan peninsula. The second line, running through the state of Chiapas, was closed after flooding from Hurricane Stan in 2005 damaged or destroyed 70 bridges, rail officials said.

The U.S. company that operated both lines, Connecticut-based Genesee & Wyoming Inc., announced in June that it was liquidating its Mexican assets due to the poor state of the equipment and the lines and declining freight traffic.

The shutdown has been widely reported in Central America, but many refuse to believe it.

“They say in the news the train here isn’t working, but people think that they’re trying to fool us,” said Juan Jose, an 18-year-old from Honduras who declined to give his last name. He was spending the night in a Tenosique church before resuming the journey north to Texas. He said he would start out on foot and try to evade the immigration authorities he knew were patrolling outside town.

“People leave Honduras with that dream” of reaching the U.S., he said. “They won’t let anyone take that dream away from them.”

Human rights workers said as many as 70,000 people jumped on the boxcars in Tenosique each year for a 1,200-mile train and bus journey to the Texas border.

Authorities and human rights workers in the Mexican border states of Tabasco and Chiapas say their efforts to convince people that the trains won’t start again soon have been futile.

Without money to pay smugglers, and having traveled too far to turn back, many continue onward on foot with little sense of the obstacles that face them, Rodriguez said. Others hop onto public transportation and are quickly spotted at the numerous immigration checkpoints on the highways.

After the Mayab line through Tabasco stopped running on July 29, as many as 1,500 migrants were stranded in Tenosique for several days. Many camped out near the crumbling station -- until Mexican immigration officials arrived to sweep them out of town.

“The police came and burned down their camp,” said Maldonado, the priest.

But migrants continue to trickle into Tenosique. Without trains, their options are few, including paying a local smuggler to get them deeper into Mexico by vehicle. Or they begin what many consider a quixotic trek on foot.

In Tabasco, the migrants walk through a verdant but perilous landscape of snakes and swamps, with newly aggressive Mexican immigration authorities on their heels. Immigrant detentions in Tabasco have doubled in the last two years.

Even though the line that runs along the Pacific coast of Chiapas has been shut since 2005, people are still walking along the tracks there, human rights groups say. Small groups have arrived with bleeding and blistering feet in Arriaga, 150 miles from the Guatemalan border, said Heiman Vazquez, who runs a shelter there.

“We’ve seen people who’ve needed emergency treatment for snake bites,” Vazquez said. “When they get here, they don’t have money. Some people look for work. But there are so many people, the pay is very low.”

When the train stopped running, more than 1,000 people were stranded in Arriaga. Fewer migrants stop there now. Instead, many pay locals to guide them by foot or vehicle around the checkpoints where Mexican immigration officials stop cars and buses.

“In Tabasco, human rights officials say smugglers are charging $200 for the trip from the Guatemalan border to Villahermosa, the state capital. From there, many migrants try to catch bus rides to Coatzacoalcos, from where northbound trains are still running.

Mexico’s train system remains deeply ingrained in Central America’s collective psyche as the vehicle of choice for escaping poverty.

For the poorest immigrants in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, the train was a kind of “public transportation,” a cheap alternative to the $7,000 to $10,000 a smuggler might charge for the journey from El Salvador to a U.S. city, said Jesus Aguilar, director of the Central American Resource Center in San Salvador.

Now the absent train is but one more obstacle in a road filled with them, Aguilar said.

“All of these difficulties have only sharpened the migrants’ survival instinct,” he said. “They tell themselves, ‘If there’s 10 walls to jump over, I’ll jump over all 10.’ ”

Such determination was in evidence recently at a downtown Tenosique church, where a group of 15 stranded Hondurans and Salvadorans was resting before continuing along the tracks.

Their journey had already involved long bus trips through Guatemala’s Peten rain forest, assorted bribes to Guatemalan police, a jungle boat trip on the Usumacinta River to the largely unguarded Mexican border, and then a two-day walk to Tenosique.

A slight teenager named Orlando Jonathan, who said he was 16 but looked much younger, was on his second attempt to reach the United States. He had been detained a week earlier by Mexican officials after walking 13 miles on the rail line from Tenosique.

“They sent me back to Honduras, and it took me three days to get back here,” he said.

“My mother is waiting for me in Los Angeles,” he added. He hasn’t seen her in eight years.

Mexican immigration officials and police routinely detain migrants on the railroad bridges that lead west from Tenosique, human rights officials say.

One recent afternoon, a reporter and two human rights workers encountered a group of immigrants hiding in the tall grass beside the tracks outside Tenosique. They were trying to elude a state police patrol.

The grass was beginning to cover the rails, leaving only a narrow corridor to walk through.

“I just killed a snake here -- I almost stepped on it,” said Oscar Maldonado, 35, after he emerged from hiding with a friend. “There’s a lot of mosquitoes here. We’re going to get sick.”

Moments later, three more young men emerged. And then another, larger group joined them -- about 10 men and women, some of them wet because they had jumped into a nearby swamp to escape the authorities.

“There were 30 of us, but then everyone scattered into the bushes,” Maldonado said.

Efrain Rodriguez Leon, a human rights worker, tended to one woman who had cut herself on a rancher’s barbed wire fence in the rush to get away. He shook his head.

“They’re only three kilometers [nearly two miles] from Tenosique,” he said. “And they have 2,000 more to go.”

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hector.tobar@latimes.com

Cecilia Sanchez of The Times’ Mexico City Bureau and special correspondent Alex Renderos in San Salvador contributed to this report.